"Are you all right?"
I laughed, without opening my eyes. A tight, wild, and choking sound that arched my back up from the floor. Lucien rocked back, his heels scraping as he settled his weight onto them.
He said nothing, as he would if he were real, letting me purge whatever streak of madness had bubbled up. When the laughing left me at last I lay flat, fingers splayed against the floor as if waiting to be impaled there, stuck to a board like a long-dead butterfly.
"Better?" he asked, his night-silk voice tinged with the wry amusement that had first hooked my heart and drawn me to him.
I dared to open my eyes, but looked only at that domed ceiling. If I were to spring upwards, to claw and stab and slash at the stone, would it give way to clear sky, to raw rock, or something deeper still, something beyond the world that had borne me? I hoped the latter. The latter meant this was still an illusion. Ancient, bastardized magic.
"The thing is," I said, my mouth dry as cotton, "you're not real."
He snorted. "You've always been free with the compliments, my love, but you've never called me too good to be real before. What's the catch?"
"The catch," I mused, dragging my clawed hands up to rest on my belly just to feel the rise and fall of breath I didn't need outside of speech. "Is that this place wants me to kill you."
"Does it?" The heavy wool of his coat hissed as he shifted, glancing around at the walls that trapped us. "Rude of it."
"I thought so."
"Where are we?" He reached a hand down to me, fingers curled in invitation at the edge of my peripheral vision.
I took it. Taking his hand was as instinctive to me as the breath I didn't need, his touch the most natural thing I'd felt in months. He yanked me to my feet, and we did everything we could not to look at one another as we inspected the walls that trapped us, gleaming with the bloody sheen of red light.
"I don't know," I admitted. "Some other-place dug up out of the archives by young sunstriders who love the old ways, but not the people old enough to have lived those ways."
He gave me a long, sideways glance, quirking the corner of his lips into a smile. "Making friends with the younger generation, are you?"
I laughed and reached up, shaking my hair out with my claws. There wasn't much point in spending the strength to put them away. "Vampires don't like things they don't understand any more than mortals do. We like them less, truth be told. Stodgy bunch of traditionalists."
"Vampires? What of your great divide, Magdalene? What of your love of the sun?"
That question didn't sound like Lucien—it sounded like Ragnar. I spun, expecting to find that pale northern face in place of my dark-haired love, but it was still Lucien, watching me with his half-smile and his hands in his pockets. If it weren't for the silver of his eyes, the scent of his blood so close, I could almost mistake him for mortal again. Light knew I wanted to.
"Your age is showing," I told the thing which sat in judgment of me, the presence that was always watching, pressing, but never intruding. Never quite showing itself. "Just like the jumbled faces and bodies in the forest. You were not meant to wait this long to get your claws in my mind, were you? The memories are too old, too tangled. You got his body well enough—light knows that detail is clear as glass in my mind—but you're twisting words. Lucien wouldn't say such a thing. But his sire—" The word tasted foul in my mouth. "—he would say that, in just that way."
"Magdalene," Lucien said as I glared at a globe of red fire. "Who are you talking to?"
"The only other real thing in this room."
"Am I a figment of your imagination, then?"
"An amalgamation, more like. But yes. And a poor one at that."
"Ouch," he said, chuckling. He let his steps make a soft sound so that I could track his progress as he paced the perimeter of the room, dragging his very-human looking fingertips against the cold stone wall, as if searching for an exit.
"I wonder what you would have been, if we had never met." I said, watching him search. Forcing myself to pick out every scrap that might mean he was not my Lucien. Not really. Did he always sweep his hair behind his right ear, or was it his left? My recent experiences with him had been so fraught I had to dig into the deep past, the old memories. But those were the same memories this place was tapping into. To remember might mean to feed the realism.
"Would you have taken the form of my sister, turned into a nightwalker? Or Roisin, or Claudette, having embraced the powers of the night? What other love would the cave have perverted to test my resolve?"
"A touch philosophical for being trapped in a hole in the ground." He paused his search and looked over his shoulder at me. One moment of locking gazes with those silver eyes was all it took to drop the faith out from under me that he was anything but Lucien—my Lucien—real and present and visceral.
I caught my breath. The air smelled like him, stronger than it should even to my senses. Damn this place.
"It's nothing but a thought experiment." I jabbed one claw into a perfect, smooth wall, twisting until a curl of stone extruded and dropped to the ground. Real place. Magical set-dressing.
"A puzzle, then, that we must figure out together to escape?"
Too casual. My Lucien would not take being trapped in this room with such light humor. Maybe in the time before he had been turned he would have been able to, but now the mantle of the nightwalker weighed too heavily. Not to mention the hunger. The scent I had tracked along the river was not one of a well man.
"This puzzle is solved." I gestured to the crimson flames. "Here, at the end of the flame's life, I prove that I can stand against the night. I prove that I can cut down nightwalker, no matter their form."
"Then why have you not attacked?"
He faced me full-on, hands held open at his sides, palms facing me and his fingers curved to show he carried no weapon—not even the claws of his hands.
Lucien in his full power would not have been an easy thing for me to destroy, even should I want to, but trapped and weakened with hunger? I could smell it on him, the lingering sickness I'd traced along the water, the desperate desire to die, but the inability to do it to himself. The leash of his nature.
I hadn't smelled that before. The second before I'd thought of hunting him along the Thames he'd smelled fresh and hale, strong despite the underlying odor of death that clung to all nightwalkers. The judge was learning, skimming my thoughts, adjusting the being I faced to my reality. I snapped my head back and scowled at the empty air above.
"Do you want this to hurt? Is that the point? To forge us in a crucible of agony? I have died for you, for my promises, and this—you ask this of me still? I have rejected the night!"
Rejection is not enough. Destruction must follow.
The voice, rancid as a slick of fat festering on top of stale water, slid into my thoughts. It clunked and hissed, unused to words.
"Do I have your attention now?"
I curled my lips, baring fangs, and shoved all five claws of one hand into the wall, dragging, rending the stone as easily as I could flesh. Not so real, this place, after all. And it was breaking down. Cracking at the seams as I forced my challenge.
"Lucien wants..." My voice caught, cracked and scraped. I pressed on. "... to die. You can sense that, can't you, watcher? You caught the memory and adjusted, made him weak with hunger because he is. He is draining himself away to nothing because he believes his existence a crime. But is it any worse than mine? Does a sunstrider destroy any less than a nightwalker?"
Yes.
"Why? We did not all start out this way, did we? You remember, you fucking thing, for you would not exist if it wasn't true—if, at one point in time, we didn't all have a choice. This isn't a trial, it's not a test of something that already exists. It's a forge of chains. The oath is not tested here, it is made. Do you have a twin somewhere? Some other hellhole beneath the mantle of the earth to judge the intent of the nightwalkers, to leash them to their source of power? I made a choice every step into this r
oom and I'm telling you, you fucker, I'm not killing this man. Do you understand me? You want a rejection? How's this: I reject your judgment."
You will bend.
A tremble rocked the ground, a dog shaking loose an infestation of fleas. I pitched, falling to one knee as the floor roiled beneath me, the walls shuddering. Shadows boiled behind the window-flecks of gold.
"Claudette's eyes were hazel," I told the walls, I told the floor, I told the Lucien-shadow in the cave, I told myself, squeezing my eyes shut against the shuddering of the room, the shaking of reality.
You will be leashed.
The red flame pulsed, the globes whipped into an invisible maelstrom, wind without source tearing at my hair, my eyes, my clothes and skin. The spheres smeared together, filling the cupola with the death-glow of fire, growing in intensity until all the world was burgundy and my skin blistered from the kiss of flame.
"Magdalene!" Lucien. Agony raked his voice—not physical pain, but emotional turmoil, the edges of his words warbling with the hint of sobs. I looked at him, the Lucien-shadow, for even if he wasn't real he was my anchor, my fishhook to the mortal world.
He knelt across the room, on his hands and knees, one hand pressed to the wall as the other dug into the ground, claws extended to hold him in place. His lips, thin with hunger, pulled back in a rictus snarl born of pain as the red flames danced and swirled, lashing him, tearing at him, driving him to a frothing frenzy of bloodlust and pain.
Figment or no, I knew what he felt. The memory of a hunger so desperate I'd lunged for Seamus's throat came back to me, the complete loss of control everything I'd ever feared might lurk within my heart.
The very bestial instinct this crucible was meant to leash. To contain. For we were monsters without the oath the blood, monsters worthy only of destruction. For if we were not destroyed, we would flense this world to the bone. It was what we were. What we were created to be. Destroyers. Even we who served the light.
Kill the nightwalker, leash the beast.
"Get fucked." I snarled, digging my claws deep into the stone, willing myself to freeze in place, to crush every instinct I'd ever nurtured to destroy the monstrous thing that rode shadow-Lucien's mind.
Kill it kill it stamp it out destroy killit killitkillit.
The Lucien-shadow screamed, but not in his voice. The judging presence burgeoned, thickened the air with flame and the scent of blood, the promise of peace and tranquility if only I obeyed. But illusion or not, I would not kill the shadow in the cave. For a real man cast that shadow, and the blood of his effigy would not be on my hands.
Something wanted me, wanted us, leashed. And the thing that snapped the chains shut was no mortal.
"Your eyes are blue," I told Lucien as he raged and thrashed beneath the flames and the bloodlust.
What were mine?
The world twisted. Reality smeared at the edges, blackness like ink seeping in through the cracks between worlds until I wasn't kneeling anymore, because there was no up, no down, nothing but the endless place—an alien plane, the place I had traveled with Lucien. The place that had spilled into the world and devoured that man on the streets of London.
"My name was Selene," I said, and the world washed away.
Thirteen: Magic Untold
"We didn't know," Hanna said.
"The records said—" Julian was cut off by Maeve.
"You mean the records you don't know how to read?"
A glimmer of light, white and blinding, produced by nothing more than a modern lamp tickled edges of my vision. I moved to open my eyes but—no, they'd never closed. I hadn't passed out, or been knocked unconscious. I had simply... ceased... for a time.
I stood in the black hall, before the sigil Hanna had activated, alone. The presence of judgment lingered, but far away, wary. A dog that had had its nose swatted and retreated to the safety of under-the-bed for the time being. Waiting. Watching.
I flipped off the dark and turned, pushing through the massive marble doors that Hanna and Julian must have dragged me through some... time... before.
A remnant of that other place clung to my psyche. A blast of morning sunlight brushed the feeling away, like clearing cobwebs.
I stood in the shadow of the double doors, both hands grasping the cold stone, holding myself up by force of will more than anything. With the rush of light came an injection back into my own body, and all its aches and pains and sensations of hunger. My back stung. My knees wobbled. I gripped the doorway tighter.
I was on the edge of the Durfort-Civrac estate's rose garden, the marble doors inserted into reality in the space between two massive oak trees, the air heavy with the scent of old leaves and winter-bitten branches.
Those doors, I realized, did not exist until I had opened them. Maeve, Emeline, Julian, and Hanna stood in a tense crescent around the clearing between the shadows of the oaks. Maeve's mouth hung open in shock, Emeline's eyes were wide as full moons, and Hanna and Julian looked like whipped dogs.
I stepped into the light. The doors, and the Crucible of Flame, vanished into nothingness.
"I'm sorry, Maeve," I said, holding up my bare wrists. "I seem to have lost your bracelets."
She whooped with joy and jumped at me, grabbing me into a rough hug, the cold metal of her trinkets biting into my sore skin.
Emeline smoothed the front of her blazer and offered me a quizzical smile. "We were worried about you, Miss Shelley."
I cut a look at Hanna and Julian, who both found the dirt around their shoes very interesting.
"Why?" I asked, tensing under Maeve's grasp. "Only someone who failed the trial would die in there." The lie came easily to my lips—the perks of freedom from leash-magics. "My oath remains intact."
"She's right." Maeve said, pushing me back to arm's length to look me over from head to toe. Her gaze snagged on my eyes, but she didn't comment. I wondered what color they were now. "No vampire walks out of that hellhole that isn't bound to the oath. It's a monstrous place that was put out of use for a reason. It's psychological torture."
My right eye twitched.
"I never would have condoned the use of the trial," Emeline said quickly. "I'm so sorry. Please, accept my deepest apologies and the assurances that these two halfwits will be punished for their idiotic actions."
I held up a forestalling hand. "There's been enough punishment all around, don't you think?"
"Miss Shelley—" Emeline began to protest, but I shot her a silencing look. My body sagged. I'd had enough. Enough of... of everything.
"There are few enough of us as it is, my Lady. Really, they've done me a favor. My probation must end now, mustn't it? I passed the trial."
I pressed my lips together, the echo of Lucien's screams, begging to be put out of his misery, echoing back to me across impossible distances. "There is no purer test of a sunstrider's oath."
"No. There isn't." Emeline agreed, eyeing the place between the oaks with a wary shiver. "I reinstate you to your full position and duties, Miss Shelley. And if anyone objects, they can pass the trial themselves."
"You must rest," Maeve insisted, unstopping a narrow vial that hung from a chain around her neck. It stank of menthol, but the wrinkling of my nose didn't stop her from smearing it across my sore arms.
"I must feed," I remonstrated, gently pushing her hands away. I met Emeline's eye. "And then I must work. There is much to do, to discuss."
"Yes," Emeline said, nodding tightly. "Come with me."
I left the garden, following Emeline's shadow. The feel of Maeve and Hanna and Julian's gaze lingered on my back, asking silent questions none of them would, or could, give voice to. I couldn't be sure how long I had been gone. I had been thrown into that place at night, and it was noon now, but it could have been hours, or days. That sticky feeling of having been cut loose from reality lingered against my skin, against my psyche.
The glass double doors from the garden to the estate parted without a touch as Emeline approached, wrenching me back
into the present.
"Things have changed here, since I've been gone," I said, meaning the doors. An update by the builders during reconstruction, no doubt. It pained me that I had been at DeShawn's long enough to miss even such small details.
Without turning she said, "Things always change. But I, and this place, have grown."
Roisin waited at the foot of the staircase. She leaned against the banister, arms crossed low over her ribs, and watched me approach though a shock of red hair that fell across her left eye, the golden mirror of my silver one.
I licked my lips, anticipating questions. Challenges. Roisin alone knew how thin my oath had grown before Maeve's shackles went on. She only sniffed the air, tipped her head to one side, and then fell into step behind me. I thought Emeline would turn her away—what we had to discuss was fragile—but she ushered us both into her office and sat us down across from her.
The phlebotomist's kit I had seen before Ragnar died was still on her desk. I made a point of looking at it.
"Ah," she said, resting one flat palm against the lid as if she could push it down, bury it into the core of the earth. "Our little riddle. I have yet to puzzle out the meaning, if you're wondering."
"What is it?" Roisin asked. Her accent, a soft lilt, came out thicker than usual. She only lost the ability to blend her speech into her surroundings when she spent too much time alone. My heart panged.
"A warning," I said, before Emeline to could answer. Nudging her hand aside, I flipped the lid open, let Roisin see the tools, then handed her the card tucked into the lining.
"The commander shall not give," Roisin read the words with mock gravity. "Dramatic." She flicked the card back onto the desk, and it settled between Emeline's resting palms.
"A bit of drama," I said, "to reinforce the seriousness of the rule. Adelia did not know it, did she? The Sun Guard had been too long without awakened sunstriders. She had no idea there were rules in place to keep the head of the order from being fed upon."
"You're correct." Emeline picked up the card by the corner, pinching it between two fingers. "Her focus, and education, was centered upon keeping tabs on the nightwalker population, and keeping the sunstriders safe."
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